


I Hope That Something Better Comes Along

by ej_writer



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Death Threats, Domestic Violence, Established Relationship, Gun Violence, Harringrove Week of Love 2021, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pre-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29372919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ej_writer/pseuds/ej_writer
Summary: Neil goes too far, and Billy needs help.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 6
Kudos: 51
Collections: Harringrove Week of Love





	I Hope That Something Better Comes Along

**Author's Note:**

> Today is the third day of HWOL!!! I chose Hurt/Comfort as the prompt! This story is on my tumblr @thehairingrove if ya wanna check it out over there!!!

The roaring engine of a Camaro z28 the next street over, the sound of keys jingling outside the front door, the stairs creaking under the weight of booted footfalls; Steve knows Billy finally made it.

He’d been expecting him for the last four and a half hours. They were going to go into the city just to find something to do, anything at all to be together and far away from here.

Clearly those plans had changed, but only because Steve knew not to wait up for Billy. If at all possible, he was always the most punctual person. If Steve said be there quarter to five, the doorbell would ring the very second the clock struck 4:45. So once the hands ticked well past midnight, he knew it wasn’t going to happen.

It’s for that same reason that, when Billy pushes open the door to his bedroom, announcing his presence with a quiet, rough little “S’me Stevie.” barely audible even in the silence of the night, he just knows something bad has happened.

Laying on his side, his back is to Billy’s side of the bed. Steve waits for the other boy to get settled, to kick off his shoes and let himself fall back onto the bed, slowly letting out a shaky sigh before he asks, “What happened, B?”

“Forgot I was s’posed to take Max to some school thing today.” Billy’s voice sounds worn out and scratchy and so, so tired.

“Is it bad?” He tries not to sound upset, he knows it only makes Billy feel worse, but he hates this routine more than anything, his boyfriend showing up at any hour of the night all worse for wear.

The worst part is probably how unaffected by it Billy pretends to be. “Haven’t checked.”

A long stretch of silence sits heavy in the room before Steve has the courage to ask, “Can I see you?”

The blankets rustle behind him as Billy, propping himself up on one elbow, reaches over top of Steve to the nightstand. Steve shifts so he’s on his back, and they’re face to face in the pitch darkness.

With a click of the little golden chain, the room is illuminated with a soft yellow glow, enough that they can see each other clearly. It’s a ghastly sight that Steve is met with.

Billy, poor Billy, with dried blood smeared on his chin, in his browline, on his knuckles, bruises and cuts littering his pretty face, turning it swollen and pale. He lets his hand fall from the lamp to rest against Steve’s cheek, his thumb rubbing circles on the smooth skin there.

Being able to see the damage takes Steve’s breath away. He whispers out, “Oh, Billy.”

But Billy can’t look Steve in the eye, his gaze focusing instead on the little hairs at the back of Steve’s neck fanning out across the pillow, on the moles that litter his face and neck, pretty much anywhere that he can to avoid the sympathetic look he’ll find in his eyes.

Because he’s already so weak, with tears already wetting his eyes, he just knows he’ll break if he does.

Steve wraps his arms up around the back of Billy’s neck, tangling his hands in his long hair, and says again, the shocked state his mind is in leaving it unable to come up with any other intelligent thought, “Oh, Billy.”

It’s the tremor in Steve’s quiet voice, the genuine, gentle concern that he finds there that does him in.

Billy sobs dry in his throat before any tears spill over, and lets his arms give out from under him so he’s laying on top of Steve, who wraps his own arms around him that much tighter.

Steve tries to comfort him, presses kisses to the top of his head and whispers little reassurances, “You’re alright baby. I got ya.“ but this is bad, the kind of breakdown that only happens when Billy’s scared, inconsolable.

“He’s g-gonna kill me.” Billy whispers into Steve’s neck. 

Steve tries to comfort him, choosing his words carefully to not make him more upset. “No he's not, baby. M’not gonna let that happen.” 

“He _is_. He s-said-“ His words trail off into a whine and a sob in his throat.

And Steve doesn’t like to ask Billy questions when he’s upset, but he can sometimes shut down for so long that it’s necessary to help him. “What’d he say B?” 

“Gonna-Gonna replace me.”

“He won’t do that, sweetheart. He just wants to scare you.” Steve like to rationalize when Billy’s like this, prove to him that Neil said these things with specific intent to get him upset.

But Billy isn’t having it, shakes his head and explains, his voice breaking with the effort of stifling his tears. “No. He-he had a gun.”

And that just, takes the air right out of Steve’s lungs. It’s never been that bad before, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

Because what he wants to do is panic, to call the goddamned cops on Neil Hargrove and get his ass put away forever, but for Billy, shaking and crying on top of him, that’s the very last thing he needs to do right now.

He tries to assure him, “You’re safe. He can’t hurt you here,” but Billy’s not listening, his head is somewhere else.  
  
Steve recognizes that place as being in the beginning stages of a panic attack.

They’d dealt with quite a few of those, mostly on nights when something bad like this happened. He thinks he’s pretty in tune with what he’s supposed to do by now, but after they happen Billy’s always downplaying them, pretending like nothings wrong so Steve will stop feeling sorry for him. 

“Hey, Bills, are you with me?” Billy’s a crier, so sometimes it’s not a panic attack, and he’ll be okay with just a little bit of TLC. 

All he gets in response is a muffled whine against his chest, and that’s how he knows now isn’t one of those times.

Billy can’t speak when he’s panicking, sometimes he still can’t for hours after it’s over either, and that’s usually how Steve can tell if he needs to put a little more careful effort into helping him.

“Okay B, can you sit up for me?” It was better for him not to lay down, he’d told him that his ribs felt like they were cracking with the effort of him trying to catch his breath if he was on his back, so Steve always tried to get him sitting up.

But when he started to panic like this, Billy would basically shut down entirely, stop doing much of anything on his own and become dead weight.

Steve had to do all the work getting him off of him and sitting up against the headboard, and for a second, Billy panics in his hold. Thrashes against the arms holding him up to try to get away from his touch. 

Steve lets go of him in a heartbeat, backing up to let Billy sit himself the rest of the way up. 

He holds his hands up and apologizes, makes himself as unthreatening as possible. “I’m sorry, Billy, it’s just me. It’s just Steve. You’re okay.” 

Billy looks at him and nods as a little acknowledgment, but his eyes go out of focus, and Steve notices him taking too shallow breaths, his cheeks flushing with the effort. “Can you breathe?”

Another shake of his head, followed by a broken off sob.

“Okay, look at me Billy, you’re alright, just gotta breathe for me baby.” He gets a hand behind his back, waiting to see if the touch is okay before rubbing circles as he tells him what to do to keep the panic from getting worse. 

“In for five, out for five.” It’s real shaky, barely works to get any air into his lungs, but Billy tries, does it through the tears, choking on the deep breath in just a little. “Good. Again.”

It’s not as deep as it should be, and the breath out gets interrupted by another sob, but it’s working at least a little in the sense that the number of breaths he’s trying to take has slowed down significantly.

“That's it. You’re doing so good, Bills. One more time for me, alright?”

Still not perfect, but he’s not struggling for air anymore, so Steve’ll take what he can get. He lets him stop, because doing the breathing exercises too many times has been known to send Billy into a deeper spiral of thinking he forgot how to breathe and starting the attack all over.

“There, you got it.” He moves the hand he had on Billy’s back up to rest at the base of his neck, still using his fingers to draw comforting circles into his skin.“You did such a good job baby.”

Billy ignores the praise, lets his head fall back against the headboard and closes his eyes. He reaches for Steve’s other hand, grasping it tight as he can when the other boy laces their fingers together.

The tears are finally slowing to a stop, so Steve thinks it’s safe to move on to the next step. “We gotta get you cleaned up. Are you gonna be okay for me to do that?”

“Yeah.” Billy says without moving, his voice all scratchy and weak from sobbing, but Steve’s proud of him for even saying anything.

When Steve lets go of his hand and gets up, Billy goes to do the same, moving down the pillows so he can swing his legs over the side of the bed, but there’s no way Steve is going to make him walk down the steps to the first aid kid after that.

He puts his hand on Billy’s chest to keep him from getting up. “Uh-uh, you’re staying right here. I’ll bring it to you.”

“Don’t need you babyin’ me.” But he doesn’t make any more moves to stand up, just looks down at Steve’s carpet with a look of something like shame on his face.

“I’m taking care of you. It’s different.” He bends down and kisses Billy’s forehead, runs his hand down the back of his hair once. “Stay put, I’ll be right back.”

He hurries down to the kitchen where his mother keeps the band aid kit under the sink, grabbing on his way a couple of wet washcloths, a glass of water with ice cubes from the fridge, and a bottle of Benadryl.

When he gets back to his room, Billy’s where he left him, but he’s got one of Steve’s pillows clutched to his chest and his face buried in it.

Steve announces himself with a knock on the door frame and a “Hey.” so he doesn’t scare Billy, the other boy looking up at him for just a second before letting his gaze fall again.

He sets all of his stuff on the nightstand and grabs his desk chair, wheeling it around to the bed. One of the washcloths goes on the back of Billy’s neck to keep him alert, a trick Steve learned as a squeamish child from his grandma, and he makes him take a Benadryl before he’ll touch him.

“Please tell me if I hurt you.” He says, and waits for Billy to nod his response before he scoots the desk chair closer, so his knees are between Billy’s legs while he tends to the damage.

His face is the worst of it by far, getting worse by the minute with time for the bruises to settle. Steve’s first order of business is wipe all the blood off and figure out how bad it was underneath.

It’s not the worst he’s seen it by far, but there’s at least a dozen little scratches all over from Neil’s rings, a good portion of them deep enough to need bandaids, and bruises on his jaw and his cheekbone and his temple, already deep and dark.

Most of the blood seems to have been Neil’s, from breaking the skin on his knuckles open again and again as he hit his son.

But Steve notices there’s a few bruises and a split on one of Billy’s own knuckles, and the picture starts to come together.

If he had to guess, he’d say Billy had probably fought back. That he was getting his face beat in and threw a punch to defend himself, and Neil got so pissed off at the threat to his authority that he resorted to drastic measures to get his son back in line.

He sighs and takes Billy’s hand in his own, dragging the damp cloth across it to get the blood, before it could start to stain his skin, off. When he it pulls away the skins all irritated, and Steve brings it to his lips, pressing a kiss there where it was split.

There’s a sharp intake of breath from Billy, and Steve feels his fingers twitch as he fights the urge to pull away from the tenderness.

When he turns the chair to the nightstand to get another butterfly bandage for his knuckles, Billy blurts out, “I love you.”

Steve, admittedly a little taken aback smiles at him, it’s the first time Billy’s ever said it. “I love you too.”

~~~~~~

It doesn’t take long for the medicine in Billy’s system to kick in, and he’s out like a light, snoring heavily like nothing even happened. Steve finds the opposite to be true for him.

He’s too busy worrying about literally everything to be able to sleep. He just doesn’t know, what is he even supposed to do?

The cops aren’t an option, the Hawkins police were less than useless when it came to domestic violence. Steve remembers hearing that Joyce Byers called the police on her husband, and they insisted she was hysterical and over-dramatizing the situation until she ended up in the hospital, and he fleeing the city.

Tommy Hagan’s dad had called 911 on his wife once, and the cops never even showed up to check it out, said they’d file a report and hung up on him. Poor Tommy still had scars from the outburst that could’ve been prevented if anyone had done anything.

For that reason alone, Steve knows he can’t call down to the station with his concerns about Neil. If word got back to the old prick that he’d been snitched on and no arrest was made, he was sure the safety would go off, and Billy’d be just another example, another warning against getting help.

So Steve tries and tries to think of any way he might be able to do something, and there’s only one in particular that stands out in his mind’s eye: to move away. To load their shit in the back of Billy’s car because he had the title, and ditch this sorry town to go far, far away from all their troubles and out of control father.

How exactly he was going to convince him they had to leave though, Steve had no clue. He already knows Billy would say no, emphasized with a resounding fuck you Steve Harrington, because he would have to leave his sister behind, most of his stuff too unless they could sneak back into his house and smuggle it out somehow, and he’d never agree to that.

Leaving had been brought up a few times before, the first being towards the beginning of when they started dating, and they were figuring out each other's boundaries about the future. Billy had made it explicitly clear from the start then that he wasn’t stepping foot off of Hawkins soil unless his sister was coming with him.

Steve knew Billy’d probably take the bullet on purpose if it meant Max was safe, and he couldn’t do that if he had fucked off somewhere to hide from his problems.

But Steve isn’t letting him go back there, he’s made up his mind on that. They’ve gone through far too many rounds of this, this awful fucking game where he’s never sure if Billy will come back to him, or if the next time he’ll see him is in a body bag, and he just won’t do it again.

Because really, how many more turns did they have before the little red button wasn’t clicked in when he pulled the trigger?

He’s tired too of giving in to Billy begging him to go back there every time something like this happened. To check on Max he said, even though they both knew it was deeper than that.

Not that Billy ever told a soul this, but Steve could tell it wasn’t just for Max, in part, it was for her mother too, he felt like he deserved to take the beatings instead of his step-mom and sister. But more than anything, it was because of Neil.

The abuse wasn’t purely physical, and, though Billy pretended like he was too tough to let it get to him, his dad had been in his head for years. Everything he thought had to go through a filter of, would Neil approve of this? Was he going to get his ass kicked if he did this, or was he going to get praised if he did this instead?

After so many years of doing that, it’s completely automatic now. Every single thing he did pandered to what his dad was okay with, what would get him the slightest bit of anything other than hostility from his dad.

And it’s apparent in all of him, the cigarettes he smoked, the car he drove, the way he talked, and got in fights, all of it was just to impress his dad, to meet his expectations for what kind of son he should have.

It’s for the same reasons that he can’t just drop everything and leave. Neil was always droning on about the importance of family, the whole, ‘I may not like you sometimes, but I’ll always love you thing’ and it really got in Billy’s head.

He didn’t think he _could_ leave, no matter how much he wanted to. He thought that bullshit bond of family, whatever the hell that even meant, kept him tied down.

It’s a horrible cycle for Steve to witness, the young son desperate for a fathers approval even after years of torture by his hand, bending over backwards to do everything right and still getting treated the way he did. 

He wishes taking him away would solve everything so he could just be safe. He wishes he could get Billy to realize he didn’t have to be a good son for a monster of a father. He wishes they could just be happy.

At some point in the night, Billy, still completely out of it from the antihistamines and not caring at all about personal space, rolls over so his back was to Steve’s chest.

The contact brings Steve back down to earth, as he blinks his bleary eyes, all tired from just staring up at the ceiling instead of sleeping. He squints at the clock on the far wall and realizes he’s spent the last hour doomsday prepping, working himself up over a conversation that he didn’t even know how it would turn out.

Who knows, maybe this time Billy would accept the offer, would happily agree to let Steve take him as far away from the flying of fists and the lies slipping past beer rotted teeth and the press of cool metal against skin as the Camaro would let him.

He runs his fingers through Billy’s hair all splayed out across his chest and let’s a long sigh out through his nose. It was funny how it was Billy who could look so peaceful while Steve was fretting over him, but maybe that wasn’t really funny at all, that he was so used to this that he could still relax without all the fears that were keeping the boy beside him awake.

That’s the thought that comforts Steve as he drifts off to sleep, the idea that, if Billy could do it, could face the uncertainty every time he walked back through his own front door, and deal with the pain on every level from what his father did to him, then he could too.   
  
He would bring it up with Billy in the morning, tell him what he’d been thinking about, and he wouldn’t be a pushover this time.

No more reluctantly agreeing to let him go back just to deal with the heartbreaking fallout a few hours later, and no more biting his tongue while Billy pretended he could do it on his own.  
  
Steve was going to save Billy, whether he liked it or not. 

**Author's Note:**

> As of right now I'm thinking I will probably continue this one in the future, but I just wanted to keep it sort of short for the event!!! I would love to hear what y’all thought!! Thank you for giving me the time!!


End file.
